Low back pain, with or without sciatic radiation, constitutes a fairly large part of the practice of an orthopedic surgeon. The current wave of becoming "disk conscious," either hidden or otherwise, tends to obscure the fact that there are many other lesions which are equally important in the causation of the low back syndrome. The discussion here concerns the problem of metastases to the skeletal system secondary to carcinoma of the prostate. Hugh Young states that "roughly and for practical purposes 20 per cent of the men over 60 years old will have symptoms due to prostatic trouble and of these 20 per cent will have cancer."1 Huggins2 states that "cancer of the prostate is the cause of death in 5 per cent of the men over 50."

There are then the small but definite group of patients over 50 with complaints of sciatica, low back pain and